New MechWarrior Announced, MechWarrior4 To Be Distributed Free

Vamman writes "In light of the recent announcement of the new MechWarrior game, Smith and Tinker has granted our online dev team MekTek.net (which has been supporting MechWarrior for almost a decade now) permission to release MechWarrior 4 entirely for free using the same type of distribution model that id Games used for Quake3's free release.

Q!

[StickansT]

What was the same type of distribution model that id Games used for Quake3's free release?

MW4 Mercs, FOSS In spirit

[Useful Wheat]

I don't know how many of you ever played Mechwarrior 4, but at its very heart it was an open source game. In Mechwarrior 4 mercenaries, you were allowed to model and add your own vehicles, weapons, and maps to the game. The Mw4 community added no less than 30 incredible mechs to the game, as well as a wide variety of vehicles and weapons that were throughly tested and balanced through extensive player testing.

It was this community effort that brought mechwarrior in line with its true battletech roots, and Microsoft gained a lot of my respect because not only did they allow it? They encouraged it, by making these extensions easy to build and distribute.

The only complaint I have is that the open source expansions broke Microsoft's expansion, and I couldn't use my WarHawk anymore. (Masakari, to you Inner Sphere Trash).

Best game I got for $1.24

[lordofthechia]

Back when Office Depot still had their 155% price guarantee, Best Buy threw Mechwarrior on sale for something like $14.99 while Office Depot still showed it at 39.99. Armed with about $20 in cash each, maps with all the Office Depots in town, and a Best Buy ad we set out, cleaning out all the copies of Mechwarrior 4 for just $1.24 each after the absurdly high price guarantee.

Also that same week CompUSA had put Riven on sale for 9.99 vs $29.99 at Office Depot (so it was free after the 155% price guarantee). They got rid of that 155% price guarantee after that. EVERYBODY got a copy of Riven and Mechwarrior for Christmas. It was great (and confusing for some)!

Re:MW4 Mercs, FOSS In spirit

[arcsimm]

As someone who was intimately involved with that process (A couple of the 'Mechs in the NBT-Hardcore mod were modeled and textured by yours truly, and I beta-tested a couple of the MekTek packs), the Mech4 community expansions were neither easy or terribly open. The first team to reverse-engineer the game's file formats was very territorial about their work and in several cases attempted to publicly e-crucify "traitors" who leaked screenshots of stuff in beta, or passed along information on the modding tools. I recall one of their devs stalling development and threatening to remove one 'Mech from the pack every day until somebody confessed to leaking the mod tools to a third party. The drama got so bad that the guy who first cracked the game's files left that team and took his tools to one of the online leagues. You should have seen the fireworks when that happened...